


in which tony stark would rather be shot and tortured than admit he has feelings

by jtrobot



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (is that a thing?), Explicit Language, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mild torture, Tony Stark Has A Heart, but he is mostly an asshole, some steve/tony at the end if you squint, stereotypical evil villain is stereotypical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 14:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1390462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jtrobot/pseuds/jtrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For an organization so keen on being mysterious and intimidating and badass all the time, SHIELD sure knew how to fuck things up an awful lot. Okay, yeah, maybe every once in a while they managed to get things right—calling everyone together that first time with Loki (the little shit) to save the world in dramatic fashion, that was a pretty smooth move. Tony hadn't really thought it would go half as well as it did. And from then on, having a team of five rather competent superfreaks at his back whenever the newest megalomaniac rolled off the assembly line with his evil robot army and delusions of grandeur was a pretty nice safety net, though he wouldn't readily admit it to anyone without at least one gun pointed at his head.</p><p>            Which, oddly enough, happened to be the case at the moment. Funny how life worked out that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in which tony stark would rather be shot and tortured than admit he has feelings

For an organization so keen on being mysterious and intimidating and badass all the time, SHIELD sure knew how to fuck things up an awful lot. Okay, yeah, maybe every once in a while they managed to get things right—calling everyone together that first time with Loki (the little shit) to save the world in dramatic fashion, that was a pretty smooth move. Tony hadn't really thought it would go half as well as it did. And from then on, having a team of five rather competent superfreaks at his back whenever the newest megalomaniac rolled off the assembly line with his evil robot army and delusions of grandeur was a pretty nice safety net, though he wouldn't readily admit it to anyone without at least one gun pointed at his head.

Which, oddly enough, happened to be the case at the moment. Funny how life worked out that way.

“Are you so sure you don’t need them now, Stark?” their latest opponent snarled, practically spitting the last word at his face. The gun was shoved up against Tony’s temple and he wasn't sure what was more irritating—the feel of the cold metal scratching against his skin, or the smell of fish or something equally vile on the man’s breath.

“I mean, I suppose, in our current situation here, they would probably help a little, but, I mean, they are the ones who got captured by an incompetent dickwad like yourself, so…” As Tony continued to shoot himself in the foot (no pun intended), his teammates watched on with varying emotions from behind the smudgy glass.

Yeah, SHIELD kind of embarrassed itself on this one. For every time the Avengers were assembled justifiably, there was at least one to match that was, to put it simply, a dud. Tony understood the whole ‘safe than sorry’ deal—understood it, mind, didn’t subscribe to it—but Fury could be a little trigger-happy with the big red button sometimes, and more often than not, they ended up suffering through an ordeal that Tony, frankly, didn’t have the time or the patience to sit through.

Like now. Tony was bound at his wrists and ankles, kneeling at his captor’s feet like a scene out of a bad porno, and had already been kicked around enough to give him a sinking feeling that dry-cleaning alone wasn’t going to salvage his suit—not the super one, but the one he had been wearing to that fundraiser for who-the-hell-knows when he was so unceremoniously kidnapped and thrown into this shitter of an evil lair. Figures; the one time Tony (okay, Pepper, it was mostly Pepper) had convinced Coulson that this was a very important event that he had to attend, and that the rest of the team would do fine without him, please and thanks, also happened to be the one time the villain of the week had kind of a thing for the whole collection and decided it was necessary to involve Tony after capturing the others.

So now they were all stuck in this grubby little basement, lit by one mangy overhead bar of florescence, and separated into two rooms; the one in which Tony and this crazy fuck occupied (no, really, Tony couldn’t for the life of him even remember the guy’s name, he was so forgettable in a long line of losers), and the second cell, separated by a huge window, where all the others were being held.

Tony didn’t know how in the hell they managed to get themselves captured by this dumbshit. All he knew was that they could clearly see this whole embarrassing situation play out. And the worst, the absolute worst was that they looked an awful lot like they were enjoying it.

Tony wasn’t the only one who was achingly aware that their current nemesis was as much of a threat as Coulson’s three year-old niece. Thor, for one, was wholeheartedly rocking with laughter, leaning on the handle of Mjolnir to presumably keep from falling over and crying on the floor. Though the dirty glass dividing their cell from Tony’s was at least an inch thick, it wasn’t nearly soundproof enough to keep out the raucous enthusiasm of a thunder god. Captain Every-Mission-Is-Important-And-We-Mustn’t-Underestimate-Our-Enemies-Ever America was alternately shaking his head in mock horror and grinning one of his big damn grins with his goddamn white teeth and if anything could infuriate Tony at the drop of a dime it was a Big Damn Grin from Steve Rogers. Natasha was sitting neatly, looking positively relaxed, in the corner of the cell and even she was betraying a smirk at the sight of Tony being defenselessly beaten by this clueless schmuck, which, for her, was a good nine out of ten on the hilarity scale, considering she was an android and all (it was Tony’s current theory; he would never figure out how that woman ticked but he was damned if he’d ever stop trying). Clint was slightly less dignified than his fellow agent, having brought himself to tears within the first few minutes of Tony’s capture and was burying his head in Natasha’s lap, occasionally popping up to yell something along the lines of _save us, Tony_ before disappearing in his manic amusement once again.

“Just a little, you say?” Dr. fucking Doom echoed, and cracked his pistol across Tony’s cheek. Tony fell over, blinded by the unexpected influx of pain and landed with his face in the dirt and concrete, feeling his own blood warming the bridge of his nose. He forced his eyes back open and glanced at his grimly smiling captor, and then at his teammates in the enclosed cell. He wasn’t sure who he hated more, in that instant. Steve was wincing sympathetically, but not quite genuinely. _Bastard._

“I’d say that’s an accurate representation, yeah,” Tony replied, a bit stiffly, as his tongue seemed a little larger than normal, and kind of numb from being bitten as he landed. He wondered vaguely that maybe the six of them should be taking this psycho a little more seriously as he spit a gob of bloody mush from his mouth and struggled to roll back up into a sitting position.

“Then it wouldn’t bother you in the least if I decided to end them all, right here, right now?” Seriously, ' _end them'_? Tony was half tempted to give the poor man a lesson in villainy; if you’ve made it all the way to a sexy bondage-style torture/monologue, you’ve already revealed that you don’t have it in you to kill anybody. This guy was definitely one of those psychotic fanboys, one of those twisted SOBs that just wanted to get a kick out of ‘defeating’ his idols without actually doing anything. Every baddie neatly fit into one category or another, and Tony had this one pinned. No wonder the team wasn’t worried; trying to keep a straight face with this walking cliché was a little easier said than done. That had sounded like a line right out of one of those shitty old crime dramas Banner liked so much for some reason.

Speaking of Banner, he appeared to be relishing the situation more than everyone else combined. Though Tony was unlucky enough to have been late to the party, he could deduce from prior experience and a not unimpressive knowledge of the type of chemicals an ordinary, vanilla criminal had access to that the guy had been drugged up, in an attempt to keep him from Hulking out and inevitably ruining everything. And in that respect, the plan was working, but…strangely enough, the drug used this time around appeared to have side-effects suspiciously similar to those of your common street corner-variety weed. In other words, Banner was awfully giggly.

“Tony, you alright out there, buddy?” he called out after taking a few minutes to collect himself enough to hurl the words over the wall, slurred together and positively dripping with amusement.

“Just peachy, sweetheart,” Tony replied, painfully craning his neck to send a dirty glare in Banner’s direction. He just made out the image of his quiet, understated friend doubling over in laughter and losing his balance, which, of course, only made him (and, obnoxiously enough, the rest of the team) laugh harder, before getting a dirty boot pressed against his face.

“I said, what if I ended them now?” the villain snarled, and let off the pressure on Tony’s skull just enough to show him that he had whipped out a small, simple remote, with a safety catch covering a black button. Tony couldn’t help but snort—there was actually a button. He would bet an awful lot of money on the fact that there was, or had been at one point, a sticker on it that said ‘DO NOT PRESS’, but his vision wasn’t so clear at the moment so he couldn’t verify the hypothesis. The poor guy was practically reading from a script on how to be evil. He flipped the catch with his thumb, triggering a warning beep and causing an ominous red light to flood the other cell. This muted the imprisoned Avengers briefly as they considered how much they were willing to continue laughing through a bomb threat. All but Banner, that is; the doctor, bless his soul, gave an appreciative ‘ooh’ at the mood lighting and became entirely focused on examining the way it played on his arms and changed the hue of his white button-down shirt.

“Tony,” he giggled, pressing a palm up against the glass. “Tony, help.” Tony’s captor lifted his foot and Tony clumsily rolled out from beneath it to look towards the window again. Clint appeared to be egging Banner on and Natasha was actually grinning. Like a real person. “Save us with SCIENCE.” Okay, yeah, okay. That was it.

“Dammit, call it off,” Tony demanded, wiggling his way into a standing position—an impossible feat made possible only by the desire to end all this fuckery that was consuming every fiber of his being and helping him defy a few laws of physics along the way. “That’s enough. I need them, alright? Newsflash: I can’t do everything.”

“Oh, really?” the psycho drawled. He reapplied his gun to Tony’s forehead. “Care to elaborate?”

“Not particularly, no.” In a flurry of motion, the gun was shifted over a few feet to point directly at Steve’s chest and was fired without hesitancy. The shot rang in the walls of the room and once the sudden noise unclouded Tony’s senses, he could see an intricate spider web of cracks running through the glass in front of a somewhat shocked-looking Steve. The wall had caught the bullet but took quite a beating in the process. Okay, so maybe the dude was fucked up enough to cause some damage, after all. At least the bullet had shut up the laughing. There really was a silver lining to every cloud, wasn’t there?

“And if any of you try to break that wall down now,” the gunman added to his prisoners, waving his pistol wildly in their direction in one hand and the remote in the other, “this whole goddamn building’s going up in flames and we’ll all die together.”

“Yes sir,” Bruce said loudly with a clumsy salute, and for once nobody felt tempted to encourage him any further. Clint and Thor had since sobered up, and Natasha was now standing with a hand on her holster, presumably downloading Battle Mode 0x775 into her mainframe or something like that.

“Are you sure?” Tony was asked again, and he couldn’t help noticing his captor twitching, just a little, right above his eyebrow. Sanity had left the building.

“I can’t do it on my own. I never could.” The detonator was lowered to a slightly less threatening angle, but there was still a finger unnervingly close to that ridiculous looking button, so, “being on this team is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I mean, I have Pepper, and Rhodey, but they’re different, and I’ve never really had—people who, you know, yeah.” Tony shrugged. God, he was never going to live this down. He glanced at the glass and back, quickly enough that the gunman didn’t catch that he wasn’t currently the center of Tony’s attention. Dammit, but Steve was smiling one of his genuine heartwarming ‘see, Tony, you _do_ have a soul’ smiles. Those were even worse than the Big Damn Grins. Fucking hell.

“People who what?” his captor prompted, and Tony couldn’t for the life of him understand what the guy was getting out of all this. Oh, dear God, if he was streaming this live somewhere—but the gun was at his head again and it was either be humiliated, possibly on the internet, or die, possibly on the internet. The first had already happened loads of times—it was practically his livelihood—so Tony figured he might as well stick with the devil he knew.

“People who care,” he explained, trying his damndest to pretend said people weren’t currently giving him their undivided attention. “People who get it, get what it’s like to be fucked up sometimes, and who feel better after kicking some ass, and who sleep in my house and eat my food because I always used to think I built the Tower way too damn big but now it’s just the right size.”

“Kneel.”

“What the f—“ Tony was bashed in the head again and he tried to preoccupy himself with what he was going to do once he got out of this mess. He fell down to his knees and pretended he didn’t hear five different sources of laughter erupting from the other side of the room. Food Network. That’s what he’d do. Lots and lots of Food Network.

“Now, kiss my foot. Show me I’ve won.” Okay, great, pistol to the head again, and maybe later tonight he’d tell Pepper that he had been heroically held captive by a dignified, acceptably terrifying cell of terrorists and get a single manly tear rolling down his face from the PTSD and she’d do anything for him because she would be so turned on by his angst and fucking hell that boot tastes like _shit_ —

Another shot was fired. From his vantage point, all Tony could see was the remote and the gun both harmlessly falling to the floor, before being followed by their owner, who was grimacing in pain and clutching his shoulder. Tony wasted no time in sitting back up and watched without a word as Coulson, of all people, quickly approached the kidnapper and pressed his smoking revolver into the writhing man’s back.

“You’re now under arrest. You have the right to remain silent,” he stated as he deftly replaced his gun into its holster and brought out a set of handcuffs. “You also have the right to cry to your mother, if it makes you feel any better,” he added. Tony stared, waiting to speak until Coulson administered to him, removing the lengths of rope from his appendages.

“Don’t you dare tell me you were here this whole time,” he threatened, rubbing his wrists absently.

“Not until the very end. I couldn’t get a good shot until you were out of the way. Until you were…on your knees,” the agent informed him smugly, and Tony wondered what exactly the penalty was for assaulting a federal agent.

It was a simple matter of giving the glass wall a love-tap from Mjolnir to shatter it, and the imprisoned Avengers stepped out, crunching it beneath their feet. To his dismay, Tony stood very still as Thor approached him, beaming and putting a ridiculously large Asgardian hand on his shoulder.

“You did very well, brother,” he enthused, and Tony faked a smile that came out looking more like a wince. “Your sentiments were pure and brought a warmth to my heart.” Tony nodded and quickly left to pick up the discarded gun and detonator on the floor.

“You call yourself heroes,” the man spit as Coulson collected the garbage that was bleeding on the floor. “Stark, you think you’re so special but you’re not. You’re just a sad little fuck like the rest of us. A needy bitch. You know what? I pity you.”

“C’mon, buddy,” Coulson said to their prisoner. It was a placid enough statement, but there was definitely a lack of emotional neutrality in the way the agent accidentally jostled the man’s gunshot wound as he and Steve lifted him to his feet. Tony just stood on the broken glass, not intending to give the criminal what he wanted, i.e., his full, undivided attention, but for some reason he couldn’t look away as the three of them left the room.

“Does anyone have any chips?” Banner asked mildly.

 

~

 

Normally at these post-assignment meetings the team was hesitant to provide too much information to Fury, because they either didn’t trust him or didn’t want to have to relive the mission (‘we caught the bastard, isn’t that all that matters?’ was a phrase oft uttered in SHIELD headquarters) but no stone was left unturned as they animatedly discussed every juicy detail of Tony’s capture. Tony was half wishing he’d just stayed behind in that cell with the psycho. He had his phone out under the cover that he had to monitor some time-delicate experiment he was running back at the lab, and whether or not Fury believed it was none of Tony’s concern. He just needed something to hide behind—now that was a new feeling.

“And after he shot the window,” Clint was speaking, leaning on the table excitedly, “he was all, ‘tell me how much you love them, bitch,’ cause he was obviously getting off on it, and Stark, this is the best part, Stark goes—“

“Stark gave him what he wanted,” Steve interrupted, loudly. He shot Clint a look and Tony glanced up from his phone, not really sure what Cap was playing at. “He satisfied the target and then got out of the way so Agent Coulson could make the shot.” Tony was once again finding himself in one of those rare situations in which he had no idea what was going on. All he did know was that everyone in the room was carefully avoiding eye contact with him. Steve finished the summary, keeping it factual and brief, and none of the others chimed in again.

“Very well,” Fury concluded, and the team began getting ready to leave. “I expect you’ll all remain within contact for the next forty-eight hours if we need to conduct further questioning, as usual.”

“Yes sir,” Tony replied emphatically as he pocketed his phone. He wondered vaguely if he shouldn’t be drawing attention to himself in this particular scenario, but his mouth worked faster than his brain sometimes and there wasn’t much he could do about it. Fury was looking daggers at him but, astonishingly, didn’t say a word. Instead, he swiftly left the conference room, leaving the rest of the team to, presumably, mete out the verbal abuse themselves. Because Fury obviously knew what actually happened back in that cell; the bastard somehow always knew everything. Always.

Nobody said a word to him. Steve and Thor were casually discussing whether or not the captor was bluffing about activating the bomb, while Natasha and Clint were silently putting on their jackets and, Tony suspected, sending each other meaningful glances in some super-secret spy code.

Banner, in particular, was being awfully quiet. Tony knew full well that he was already standing on thin ice, but—again, mouth to brain connection, bit unfortunate—instead took this golden opportunity to walk up close to the mortified scientist and stare him down for a minute or so, just to make him uncomfortable. He took his time to enjoy Banner’s complete inability to look him in the eye, and spoke once he was satisfied with the level of awkwardness surrounding the two of them.

“I _so_ wish I had known you in college,” he said and walked out of the room, an ugly smirk on his face. It vanished when he realized that Steve had followed him.

“Hey, Tony,” he said, easily catching up to him in the hallway and putting a hand on his shoulder. “What you did today—“

“Oh, it makes _sense_ now. You wanted to wait so you could harass me in private. Look, we all made it out alive, right? Mission accomplished. End of story.”

“I get that you don’t want to hear it right now but I know you meant what you said back there.”

“Great, mhmm, it was a touching moment for everyone involved. Maybe we’ll get the gang back together this weekend and we’ll watch Meg Ryan movies and bake—“

“Christ, Tony, will you just listen? I just want to make sure you know—and I know for a fact that I can speak for all of us when I say that—we need you, too.” With that, he walked away, and the smile that pushed its way onto Tony’s face once he was alone wasn’t exactly a Steve Rogers variety Big Damn Grin, but it had a few remarkably similar characteristics.

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory remark about this being my first-ever fanfic. Even more obligatory remark about my gratitude to you for reading. :)


End file.
